


Finding Home Among Blood and Lemons

by ashisfriendly



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Love at First Sight, Meet-Cute, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 04:54:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4250127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashisfriendly/pseuds/ashisfriendly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU! Leslie gets an internship at the White House fresh out of college but DC isn't all it's cracked up to be. Enter Ben, who is also in DC for some reason. SEX ENSUES. This is a very good summary don't try to tell me otherwise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding Home Among Blood and Lemons

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to c00kie for encouragement and overall love and opti for helping me decide what weird AU to write.

This isn’t right.

It’s not just the stupid bed frame. Leslie wishes she could just blame the bed frame, but no. It’s everything. It’s the hours of traffic she sat in to get here, the note left on her door about the landlord leaving (because of course he left, she was four hours late because of the traffic) and it took him another hour to come and let her into the apartment. 

The apartment.

It looks kind of like it did in the pictures, but there are cracks in the walls and no oven and the electricity isn’t on even though she called the electrical company to make sure it would be. She has electricity now, after calling and being on hold for a half hour, but the lightbulb in the bedroom is out, so she’s building this bed frame in the middle of her barren, box-lined living room because one thing will go right today and if that is building this bed frame so she can sleep on a bed with her new yellow and lavender striped sheets, she will do it.

Everything has gone wrong, every sign was pointing her back home, to sun rays through the trees at Ramsett Park, to waffles at JJ’s, to the smell of grease from Paunch Burger. Her mom was back in Pawnee, Ann was back there, her whole life was there. Ann. Ann could help her make this bed. Her mom could help her, too. Maybe they’d come together, her favorite women, riding in on unicorns waving American flags and offering friendship and love and the assistance of building a stupid, stupid bed frame.

Leslie turns the little wrench thing again and it slips again, causing her hand to fall, the bit of bed frame she has held on her arms to crash onto the floor and a piece of metal to slash into her palm.

Leslie likes to think of herself as super calm and optimistic and insanely chill but this? Bleeding in the middle of her living room, alone, and dripping blood right onto her new yellow and lavender striped sheets? She gets to throw a bit of a tantrum now, she has earned that right.

She screams first and then the tears come and the pain in her hand. She stands up because she needs to wash her hand and because stomping her feet sounds good right about now. It feels great and right, like she’s stomping every stupid decision that has led her here. DC, so full of magic and political power, only to make her bleed and sweat. Seriously, it is 400% humidity in this stupid swamp town and she’s tired of sweating and not having AC. She didn’t think to ask about AC. Or an oven.

The water is cold and stinging on her wound and she lets the water run pink and swirl down her drain. She lets the ball in her throat well up and she even lets tears flow because who cares? No one is here to see her cry anyway and crying is powerful, her dad always told her that.

She doesn’t even know where to find a band aid. Maybe the bathroom box? The junk box? She let’s out a huge, wobbly groan and stomps over to her new sheets and pulls out a pillow case and holds it in her palm so she can search for the first aid kid.

Leslie’s into the third box when there’s a knock on her door. She’s stopped crying by some miracle but she’s frustrated enough to let out another angry moan and hurries over to the door, yanking it open.

Leslie’s too occupied with the shit show that her life has become to prepare for whatever is on the other side of that door, so when she is face to face with a guy -- a cute guy -- she has no idea what to do. Especially since his angular, scruffy, sleepy face seems to take on a rainbow of emotions as she stares at him. First, his face is scrunched a bit and his squinted eyes are glaring at her. Then, his face softens as his brown eyes look over her and he takes a few beats to stare at her hand. He tilts his head to take a peek inside her apartment and Leslie should probably be concerned that she’s in a new city, alone, and a man is at her door, but he’s wearing Star Wars pajama pants and a white t-shirt with a small hole in the belly, so she doesn’t feel too threatened.

At any rate, a serial killer showing up at the end of this day would really only be fitting.

“Um, hi,” he says. He clears his throat and stands up straighter, his face morphing back into its angry and hard color. “It’s 3:15 in the morning.”

Holy crap, is it really? Leslie pats her jeans with her good hand, trying to find her phone but it’s not there. She looks back at her kitchen counter and it’s there by a box of books. 

“Am I being loud?” she asks, but she knows she is, she was acting like a two year old for the last ten minutes.

“Yeah.” The guy looks down at Leslie’s hand and Leslie follows his gaze. The pillowcase is quite red now. “Are you okay?”

“I’m trying to build my bed.”

“Okay,” he says, hesitant.

“It’s not working.” 

“It sounded like a herd of elephants was in here, you know that elephants can’t make beds, right?”

He actually kind of smirks while still looking annoyed and Leslie has to marvel at how cute this makes him. He was already cute but this is something else, like boy band level cute.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll be quieter. Or just forget the bed, my sheets are ruined anyway.” Leslie lifts her hand.

“Yeah, um, do you need a band aid or something?”

Now he is really turning around. His voice has gone a little higher while going softer and he’s trying to cover the hole in his shirt with his hand and Leslie just wishes, like a crazy person, that he was her boyfriend and he could just build the damn thing and she wouldn’t be alone. That’s when she realizes she’s been awake for almost 24 hours.

“I have one somewhere--”

“I can help you find it,” he blurts it out but he shrugs like it’s a casual offering. Leslie smiles and lets him in. “I’m Ben, by the way, 110.”

“Leslie Knope, 210, obviously.”

She closes the door and explains that she’s not quite sure where she put it while Ben opens boxes like it’s no big deal that he’s looking through her things. He seems focused and determined, using some kind of formula in his brain to move from one box to another. Maybe he’s a psychologist who understands packing patterns. She slowly rifles through a food box and he finds it, nestled between some DVDs in a box marked ‘stuff’ that she doesn’t even remember packing. 

Ben opens the metal box and rifles through it, pulling out some cleansing wipes and a loose band aid. He doesn’t ask before taking her hand and unwrapping it. She winces and he hums like he’s evaluating it. He lets her go so he can open the wipe and Leslie feels her lungs empty. She feels dizzy but she blames it on the lack of sleep. She also blames the lack of sleep on her fantasy of him being her boyfriend resurfacing. 

“Are you from DC?” Ben asks, picking up her hand again and wiping the pad along the outside of the cut, taking blood away first, before moving it over the wound. It stings but it’s a dull ache that kind of feels good, like putting lip balm on chapped lips.

“No, Indiana.”

He nods, wiping over again and around her hand, trying to get all the blood off. Leslie stairs at his palm and long fingers. His hand practically overwhelms hers. His hands are a little rough, and they shake as they hold onto her and the wipe, but she still wants to curl into it, shrink into the size of his palm and sleep. 

Oh God, she needs sleep.

“I’m from Minnesota.” Ben licks his lips and Leslie now concentrates on his face. It’s still sharp and pointy, with a hard chin and round eyes. He has stubble on his face, just a day or two’s worth, and his hair is an absolute mess. 

“Sorry I woke you up.”

Ben shakes his head. “It’s okay.” He yawns and laughs as it ends. “I swear it’s okay and that was just coincidence.”

Leslie yawns, too and it causes them both to laugh. Leslie leans into him a little too much and she falls forward but she quickly corrects herself. She apologizes and blames the lack of sleep as Ben unwraps the band aid.

“Nice,” he says. Leslie smiles and shrugs at the Muppets band aid. “Beaker is my favorite but Miss Piggy is good, too.”

His shaky fingers spread the band aid on her palm and he holds onto her hand, smoothing his thumb over Miss Piggy’s face a few times, even after Leslie’s pretty sure the bandage is not going anywhere.

Ben finally stops and holds her hand with the both of his for a beat too long and lets go bY sliding them down and away from her fingers. He quickly looks around the apartment and takes a step back from her. 

“So let’s take a look at this bed.” Ben makes his way out of the kitchen and squats down at the side of the bed frame. 

“Oh, no, it’s okay, really. I don’t even have sheets or anything and it’s so late--”

“I’m already up.”

Marry me.

“What?” Ben says, looking up at her.

Oh God. Is she speaking out loud now? No. Can he hear what she’s thinking now? Penguins. Blueberry pizza.

“Leslie?” Ben stands up. “Are you okay?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, I just, it’s been a long day.”

In no time, Leslie is telling him everything. And he builds the bed. He drops things and curses but he’s listening, remarks about his own experiences with DC traffic and tells her that he has an oven in his apartment she can use any time. He tells her he also misses his brother and sister but he made friends in DC pretty quickly and he’s a shut in loner so she’ll be just fine. He makes her laugh, they lift her mattress together and get it on the bed before realizing that they should’ve put the frame in the bedroom first. That makes them laugh even harder for some reason and then everything is a joke, from Ben pretending to be a ghost under one of her sheets to Leslie hitting him with a pillow.

Sleep deprivation is a better social lubricant than alcohol, Leslie figures out.

Only the top sheet has blood on it so Leslie throws it into the corner to be washed or thrown away, she can’t decide if she can part with the sheets yet. She probably shouldn’t be making any big, life decisions at 5AM with zero sleep. They make the bed together and the sheets smell like new and sh wishes they would smell like home. 

“I can help you move the bed into the bedroom in the morning,” Ben suggests. He looks to the window in her living room. “When there’s light.”

Leslie nods and giggles, shrugging. “This is not where this goes.”

Ben smiles, eyebrows scrunched in confusion. “No.”

“I don’t think this is where I go,” Leslie says, her laughter fading a bit as she looks at her hands that have joined together in front of her. Her fingers twist and tighten like her throat and she wants to laugh again, desperately wants to laugh again. She tries to picture Ben under her sheet making ghost sounds and claiming to be Abraham Lincoln but it’s not working. “Oh no, no, no.”

“Hey.” Ben rounds the bed and puts his hands hesitantly on her shoulders. He bends down to try to look at her face. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Poor Ben, he should leave. She tells him to. He doesn’t, only rubs his thumbs into her shoulders and keeps telling her that everything is okay. But it’s not. This is not where she belongs. She thought she was supposed to be here, some day, in the White House (she’s close, just interning now, but even the presidency isn’t appealing to her anymore). Ben doesn’t even know her, he doesn’t know if it will be okay, or that everything will work out, he doesn’t know anything. He’s nice and his hands feel good, but he doesn’t know her, not really.

“This was just a bad day,” Ben says. “And if my math is right and your story is true, you’ve been up for almost 27 hours. How are you alive? Are you a robot?”

That makes her laugh a little and she nods and Ben, somehow, keeps up this stupid, stupid bit.

“A political energizer bunny or something, maybe. Powered by freedom,” Ben guesses. 

She laughs. This isn’t funny, it’s dorky and his hands feel good and that’s why she’s laughing. He moves his hands to the back of her neck and he massages her there. She drops her head and moans. He rubs his hands up and down her arms and asks if she has rockets on her feet or eagle wings, too, and she laughs, falling forward, bracing her hands on his chest.

He’s laughing, too, his brown eyes so soft and playful and he smells like detergent and lemons. She leans into his neck to get more of the smell and it’s good, it reminds her of the lemon tree in Ann’s backyard and it reminds her of clean, non plastic smelling sheets. It reminds her of home.

He swallows and Leslie watches the muscles in his neck move and she pulls away, their faces close. 

“That’s why you don’t sleep, you’re a little robot.”

She nods and laughs and he laughs too. Somehow, their lips press together.

The kiss is warm and his lips vibrate with the calm of his laughter. He smooths his hands into her hair but everything feels weightless and slow like she’s moving through water. His lips pull and push against hers with soft rhythms and she is numb, unmoving, letting him hold her up and guide their mouths. His tongue gently pushes through and she gasps, awoken, and she finally begins to move with him, her tongue sliding along his, fingers gripping his t-shirt, tip-toeing to bring him closer.

Her stomach swirls flames that soar out to her limbs, making her burn as his hands travel over her skin, to the edge of her t-shirt to lift it over her head. He dusts heat over her chest as he palms her breasts, moves fingers along her nipples, trail nails over to her back to let the bra go. She drops it and moves to his t-shirt and when their torsos touch, skin on skin, she can only believe she’s floating.

It’s still so hot and she’s worried she might be sweaty but Ben leans down to her breasts and licks and sucks her flesh and she forgets about sweat. Ben’s fingers take care of the clasp of her jeans and his hands shove them down and Leslie wiggles out of them, making her giggle and Ben’s teeth scrape against her nipple. Leslie feels the softness of his stomach, flat and dusted with hair, and she is almost mesmerized by the touch. He groans when her hands go lower and makes some other sound when her hands go back to the flat expanse of skin. He hooks his fingers into her panties and pulls them down and she kicks them aside and finally, feels him, hard and perfect, over his pajama pants. 

Ben hisses, his mouth falling from her breast, forehead resting on her chest. She spreads her fingers and drags her hand up and down his shaft, squeezing and teasing. He breaths and Leslie watches the muscles in his back contract, and goose bumps form along his skin. She finally tugs his pants away and he sighs at the release before capturing her lips again. His kiss is hungrier now but just as thorough and soft. His tongue is eager and searching and she matches him, pulling him close and wrapping her fingers around him. He groans inside her mouth and it sends a lurch of electricity down her spin. Their bodies connect and he backs her into the bed and she falls back on the mattress, dumb struck, dizzy, and wanting.

Ben rubs his hands up and down her thighs, inching them further apart with every sweep. He looks up and down her body and they find themselves laughing every now and then, until laughter turns into moans as his fingers trace her, push into her, and circle her. Leslie closes her eyes and rolls her hips lazy against his hand, whispers his name and smiles, biting her lip when he teases her. She misses his kisses and the feel of his hands in her hair but she knows what will happen if he lays on top of her.

“Condom,” Leslie breathes. 

Ben pushes his fingers into her, curling up his fingers and Leslie can’t remember what she said when he asks her, “What?”

“Um” -- Ben’s fingers move faster and she feels that deep pull of warmth start in her thighs and intensify in her belly -- “I, ah” -- Ben moves forward and his other hand joins in, rubbing her clit -- “I want, we need, oh my God.”

She comes, hard, flailing on her new bed and drenching his hand. She can’t catch her breath, her body keeps spasming and Ben, fucking cute, should marry her Ben, is stilling pushing in and out of her with his fingers. Slowly. She’s whimpering and her eyes are prickling but when she looks at Ben, he’s watching his hand work and holding his dick in his other hand. He’s not moving it, just holding. He doesn’t lift his eyes when he asks her for a condom.

Right! Yes! A condom, that is what she wanted.

“Oh, I -- ah, I don’t know where they are.”

Ben slows down, thinking. Then he snaps to attention. “I think I know where they are.”

His fingers slip out of her and he trails them up to touch her clit and she yelps, squirming as he walks away, digging through a box. He comes up successful with an unopened box of Trojans. He opens it and takes off a condom from a strip and opens the package, rolling it on as he walks back to the bed.

The bed is wet underneath her ass but Ben moves her anyway, back up onto the pillows and vertical with the bed as if he was putting her to sleep. He pushes her legs apart and puts himself between them, lining up their bodies and kissing her. They rock together, finding friction and slowly angling hips just right. Leslie likes this, the intimacy and exploration that’s happening between them, how he slips from her opening but it still feels good, how they’re bumping teeth and their tongues aren’t perfectly in sync. She’s slick and he feels good sliding over her, sensitive and ready. She grabs onto his hips to keep him still and tries to match his angle below. Their lips part and he looks down between them, Leslie’s eyes stuck on the adorable crease between his brows.

Finally, he’s there, right where he’s supposed to be and if she can just push up or he push down, he’ll be inside her. She grips his ass and he smiles, lifting his head to look at her and sinks down, filling her up slowly.

“Yes,” she sighs and he kisses her, their bodies moving. It’s slow, awkward but they quickly find their rhythm and Leslie falls back, arms spread out on the bed as Ben moves above her.

She’s tired, her muscles can hardly move and she knows her eyes should stay open but he feels so good and she’s so relaxed. Ben moves above her with a deep, slow dance that makes her feel each thrust down to her toes. It’s intoxicating, she almost feels like she’s dreaming. He kisses her full and deep and his hips slow to concentrate on her mouth. They kiss like this for what feels like hours, hips only moving with small lazy movements while tongues search. Leslie feels Ben’s fatigue growing too, so she moves her hand between them and rubs her clit with his slow thrusts. This makes him speed up a little, this makes his mouth fall from hers so he can watch her hand move. He whispers her name and it’s stuck in her throat and it sounds so unbelievable. He sits up and watches, thrusting harder and she misses the weight of him on her, but this angle is everything she wanted to speed this along. Not that she wants it to stop, she’s just so tired. So, so tired.

He slows down again and holds onto her legs. “Are you okay?”

“Hm?” God, he’s hitting her in some crazy spot and the slow thrusts are agonizing but it’s worth it for that spot he hits just as he goes in all the way. She moans. “Yeah, I’m just tired.”

Oh god, she shouldn’t say that when she’s having sex with someone. He leans down and kisses her. 

“Do you want to keep going?”

He’s all in and there he is, hitting her perfectly. “Yes,” she breathes.

Ben pulls out of her and she whines, her fingers twitching to grab him and keep him there, but he moves around her, pushing her on her side and sliding in behind her. He wraps an arm around her middle and drags his fingers over her thigh and pulls her leg over his. Leslie pushes back into him, his body warm and nice around her. She closes her eyes and Ben kisses the top of her head before adjusting behind her, guiding them so they can reconnect, and when he does -- Leslie sighs like she’s finally found the most comfortable position in the world. She’s weightless and high, somewhere between awake and consciousness but in the most delicious way. Her body is heating in soft waves and she concentrates on his dick sliding in and out of her, the pressure of the angle, the breaths of his moans on her neck. She’s not going to cum, she knows that, but she could live here, Ben nestled inside her and wrapped around her body, enveloping her completely. It all feels... right, like something is finally right here, right here in DC.

Ben doesn’t last much longer, his hips becoming a little more erratic as he grips her hip. She tells him he can cum, in case he’s waiting out for a second orgasm and he unloads, grasping hips and breasts. He says, “Good Lord,” with a sigh as he pulls out of her and smooths a hand over her back, leaving trails of fingertips and lips along the skin.

Leslie’s humming and curling up, sleep closing in. Her sheets still smell plastic and new but Ben’s close enough that she can smell his soft, clean scent and she tries to focus on that instead. Ben’s talking but he sounds so far away and like he’s talking through honey.

“Hm?”

“I’ll be right back,” he repeats and she hears him better this time. Leslie reaches for him but he’s already standing by the time she gets her foggy brain to get her arms to move. He’s only gone a moment and when he returns, he picks up her hand to move it so he can get back in bed.

“Stay,” she whispers, as if he isn’t already cuddling into her back. She can’t even open her eyes and she’s no longer sure if she’s dreaming or not right now but Ben has to stay, they’re supposed to get married. Bo Obama will be the ring bearer.

Ben kisses her shoulder. “Okay.” He laughs into her skin. “I don’t know if we can even get Bo, do you know anyone who has White House connections?” he teases.

She’s talking out loud again but sleep is coming so it’s hard to care. It starts to take her just as Ben’s arm tightens around her stomach and her lips pull just enough into a smile. She takes in a breath and on it’s release she whispers, “I do.”


End file.
